Hi folks.
The system-image client (or "si" for short) is the component on devices that
performs the check for availability of system upgrades, downloads and verifies
the upgrade, and (on touch) reboots into recovery so that the upgrade can be
applied. There is both a command line version and a D-Bus version. si is
used on both touch and snappy to perform system upgrades.
It's been a long, strange trip but system-image 3.0 is very nearly ready for
release. I think I've finally managed to debug the PPA-only build failures[*]
and now have reproducible, successful builds.
si 3.0 is a major new version with lots of new features primarily to support
snappy, to converge the snappy-specific version and the touch version, and of
course to fix many bugs. The details of what's changed is available here:
http://tinyurl.com/oef9hjk
If you have the time and inclination, it would be great if you could test the
new version on both snappy and touch, and let me know (via email or bug
reports) if you notice any problems. Given that Vivid final beta freeze is 8
days away, any feedback you can provide will be greatly appreciated.
* FFe - yes I will be filing one asap.
* I will be getting this into the citrain asap. In the meantime, you can grab
the debs from my PPA:
https://launchpad.net/~barry/+archive/ubuntu/systemimage/+packages
Please install only system-image-common, system-image-cli, and
system-image-dbus. Devices normally don't include system-image-dev, so
don't install that package.
* If you manually install the .debs (i.e. make your device writable and dpkg
-i *.deb), you will also need to make some manual changes to the file
system. Hopefully very soon these will be taken care of automatically. In
the meantime, after installing the debs, become root on your device and do
the following:
$ cd /etc/system-image
$ mkdir config.d
$ cp client.ini config.d/00_default.ini
$ cp channel.ini config.d/01_channel.ini
Now do `system-image-cli --version` to ensure you're running 3.0 and
`system-image-cli --info` to verify that it's picking up the right
information about your device.
From here, you should be able to test upgrades on touch via system-settings,
or via snappy commands. The si 3.0 should be backward compatible in both of
those cases.
Cheers,
-Barry
[*] FTR, debugging build failures that only happen in a PPA are, um, fun,
especially if you like multi-hour turnaround times.